When I quoted Robert Rose saying, “Great content wins. End of story,” did I mean that great content promotes itself? That if the content is good enough, content fairies fly down and magically transport it to the eyes of an adoring audience?

I remember the first time I saw it. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, then commander of the International Space station, had taken his guitar into space. He posted a simple but powerful video of himself performing David Bowie’s classic “Space Oddity” — in space. (Note: Sadly, the license for the video has expired, so for now it’s not publicly available.)

As far as I’m concerned, this pretty well cemented his position as coolest dude there has ever been. I mean, Canadian plus astronaut plus Bowie? That’s the trifecta of cool right there.

(Plus he juggles. In space.)

Like a lot of people, I assumed that Hadfield had an amazing innate understanding of what worked and didn’t work as content. He had been posting neat and interesting content to the web for months —- great tweets and YouTube videos on funny, everyday aspects of life in space.

They were memorable, they were highly shareable, and they paved the way for that 20-million view bombshell.

So imagine how surprised I was when I read Hadfield’s biography — and found out that when he was getting started, he was actually sort of an idiot about content.

Could your content marketing use a little boost? Our friends at the Content Marketing Institute are offering a free one-day event dedicated to the technology that can accelerate your content marketing.

Copyblogger founder and CEO Brian Clark will be there, as well as other leading experts.

Search Marketing Expo — affectionately known as SMX — returns to San Jose this March 11-13.

Our own Brian Clark will be speaking and Google’s search chief Amit Singhal is keynoting — just two highlights of three days of sessions, keynotes, and clinics on paid search, SEO, social media marketing, mobile search and more.

I’ll admit it. I was tempted to call this one “Is Content Marketing Dead?”

But you’re too smart to fall for that and would have (justifiably) mocked me for it. Which would be embarrassing.

Within the content marketingecho chamber community, you might have seen some concern about the idea of “Content Shock” — the notion that as content marketing becomes more and more popular, we’ll eventually face a kind of “Content Cliff.” A period where content collapses in on itself as audiences max out on their ability to consume it.

You might remember that in December, we worked together with the team at MarketingExperiments.com to run an email subject line contest.

In order to preserve the integrity of the test, we didn’t announce any of the finalists before the test was run. But today we’re announcing all 10 finalists, as well as the final winner of the split test.

The quest? To find a subject line that would get their email opened — but also, acted on, in the form of a click through to the offer being made.